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Days When You Just Feel Shitty as a Writer

It’s been a week of no writing and lower spirits owing to a nasty bout of flu that took my family all down like dominoes, one by one. With our usual child care arrangements out the window, our high need older child trying to cope with school anxiety and the small one teething and sneezing on antibiotics for infection, I’ve done nothing on the fiction writing front and am struggling to keep up with the rudiments of my actual paying assignments. Ick.

In fact, writing has fallen off my radar screen, paling beside a) the heap of trash that needs taking out; b) listening to the baby scream when I put her down to shower; c) wondering whether I can scale back work to spend more time with the kids in general; d) gingerly noting that the state of our finances doesn’t really make (c) a good option.

In other words, it’s one of those weeks when I feel – erroneously, I know – that a massive bucket of money would just vastly improve my life; and the corollary, a generally fading sense of confidence in my writing skills having got to just 8 reads on Wattpad and getting no response from my usual beta readers. Really, maybe I am deluded. I know that not only strong writing is necessary but also luck; zeitgeist. Hell, with the latter you don’t even need the former.

Which all makes me wonder: am I just writing on the dream of getting rich?

At this point maturity trumps angst and, a benefit of three plus decades on this good earth, I cut the soliloquy short and move on. I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box right now but at least I can recognize that after a week with the flu and the kids, I’m doing pretty well just to have a clean house and the laundry done, and the writing laurels just need to wait for another day. No more beating on my own back!